The National just knows how to write whatever they want and make it a song. The words can’t hardly make sense but they are just right for the rhythm and they manage to somehow evoke feeling.
I was thinking about tasting wine. I’ve never been very good at it, or good at all. In fact I didn’t even like most of the wines I tried, and I tried a lot that were supposed to be good.
But I’ve never tasted as many as I have in these past couple of months. And the more I taste and the more I drink, even if it’s not tasting new wines it’s like drinking a whole bottle of each kind…so I guess what I’m saying is the more wine you drink, even if it’s the same two wines, the more wine that goes into your body the better you start to understand what you’re supposed to be looking for. It’s like tasting is a kind of relative thing. The first thing you have to do is drink enough so that you know what grapes in general taste like, and then you can look for the other subtleties if you want to.
It’s like Vonnegut says in Bluebeard, if you want to be able to tell a good painting from a bad one, you only need to look at a million paintings. Then you can never be wrong.
Anyone's Ghost 
I saw the national a couple of months ago when they curated a festival I went to. I didn’t really know of them before but I kind of enjoyed their set. I shall refrain from reading the lyrics of the CDs then. The fascinating thing about wine is that the same wine can taste different depending on how you feel, what you eat, the temperature and your age, among other factors. I can’t bear to drink some wines that were my staples a few years back! Not only this, I can now drink sone whites wheras I used to think white wine was piss of the devil.
Their lyrics are really moody and vague. I know almost all of them by heart since I listen to them all the time and I think I know what they’re talking about maybe 30 percent of the time.
Totally going to use that ‘piss of the devil’ line at the bar tomorrow. Yesterday I drank some wine that had been open for like five days and then immediately drank some coffee with cream and sugar that had been sitting for like three hours and suddenly I felt like I was eating one of those cheap hollow chocolate Easter bunnies I used to get when I was a kid. It was strange, but not altogether unpleasant.